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    Ed Ruscha Has Always Seen America Like No One Else. Peer Through His Eyes in a Sprawling MoMA Exhibition

    The buildings, billboards, and logos of Ed Ruscha’s 20th-century paintings don’t look like those that populate the world today. His were the product of a sparser, still-developing American West, before roads and cities were choked with cars and people and seemingly every facade was covered in the promotional copy of an overcrowded corporate landscape. Just imagine, for instance, a gas station with displays advertising… gas. Not energy drinks and e-cigarettes and Kit Kats and scratch-offs; just gas. 
    That’s exactly what’s depicted in Ruscha’s 1964 painting, Standard Station, Ten-Cent Western Being Torn in Half. It may seem quaint, but there’s something about this scene—and the artist’s subtle, perspective-shifting inclusion of a dime-store magazine floating in the upper right corner—that resonates in today’s ad-saturated America. In this painting, Washington Post critic Philip Kennicott recently wrote, “we get a perfect juxtaposition of two ideas: power and majesty occupying most of the space, then fiction and lies besmirching or staining it in the far upper-right-hand corner.” 
    Ed Ruscha. Photo: Sten Rosenlund. Courtesy of MoMA.
    Fittingly, Standard Station is the image that the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has chosen to feature in the promotional materials for its major “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN” show, organized in close collaboration with the now 86-year-old artist. With more than 200 paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and books, it is the most comprehensive retrospective of his work ever staged.  
    The magnitude of the moment has not been lost on critics, many of whom have reached for the kind of superlatives not often seen in reviews these days. “To call it the show of the season is something of an understatement,” wrote Jason Farago of the New York Times.  
    Installation view of “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art from September 10, 2023 through January 13, 2024. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Courtesy of MoMA.
    Even the critics who identified weaknesses in the MoMA presentation—some found sections of it, particularly those filled with Ruscha’s later work, inconsistent—were undeterred in their awe of Ruscha and his broader achievements. “If ‘Now Then’ strikes the same notes a few too many times for so inventive an artist,” wrote Linda Yablonsky for the Art Newspaper, “ultimately there is very little in it not to like. Anyone can connect to a picture with no fixed meaning; like the dual-action exhibition title, every Ruscha is a two-way street.” 
    Indeed, just about everyone seems to agree: the retrospective is a fitting swan song for a generationally important artist and it should not be missed. See more images from the show below. 

    Installation view of “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN,” on view at The Museum of Modern Art from September 10, 2023 through January 13, 2024. Photo: Jonathan Dorado. Courtesy of MoMA.
    “ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN” is on view now through January 13, 2024 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. 

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    New York’s Corporate Lobbies Are Filled With Famous Art Commissions. Here Are the Coolest and Most Eye-Rolling Choices

    “Art has come out of its ivory tower and into the office building lobby,” New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in 1959. That is only more true today, as corporations have seen the advantage of wowing their visitors and potential clients with works by brand-name artists, especially as the art market has continued to grow and make global headlines.  
    These works extend the great tradition of public art in New York into the indoors, and allow office workers to have a moment of beauty, aesthetic challenge, or intellectual interest on their way to work each day. 
    The future of art in corporate lobbies can be subject to the vagaries of time and, especially, changes in ownership. For example, the sculptor Isamu Noguchi created a site-specific installation in the lobby at 666 Fifth Avenue in 1957; when Brookfield Properties took over the lease in 2020, they wanted to remodel, and argued that intervening renovations to the building that changed the context meant the installation no longer reflected Noguchi’s vision. They dismantled it and donated it to the foundation that cares for the artist’s work. 
    Lobby art doesn’t necessarily have the reputation of being the most interesting or cutting-edge. Never one to shy away from pronouncing a bold opinion, the New York Post once boldly prounounced that “Lobby art sucks.” But that’s not necessarily the case. Some does, some doesn’t, and Artnet News is here to guide you. 
    What are some of the best and worst choices for art installed in office lobbies across New York City? Here’s a quick roundup of five superlatives—from the worst to the best—to guide you as you look for art in different places in your travels throughout the city, if you are seeking something different from the museum and gallery circuit. 

    Most Lame Visual Joke: Anish Kapoor at 56 Leonard 
    A new permanent public artwork by artist Anish Kapoor at 56 Leonard Street in Manhattan. Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images.
    The British-Indian artist’s first public artwork in New York is, in a way, a miniature cousin of his massive Cloud Gate, which has graced Chicago’s Millennium Park since 2006. 
    Estimated to have cost as much as $10 million, the as-yet-untitled shiny sculpture is 48 feet long, weighs 40 tons, and is installed under the corner of a new Herzog & de Meuron–designed luxury tower at 56 Leonard Street in Tribeca. The new Lower Manhattan skyscraper is commonly referred to as the Jenga Tower for its distinctive shape.
    While it might be a stretch to call the piece lobby art, since it’s outdoors, we think it’s close enough. And while the Chicago work is rightly beloved as a unique piece of public art, this one makes a lame joke, seeming to be bulging under the weight of the building that hosts it.
    ArtNews’s Alex Greenberger wrote when it was unveiled that “this sculpture is no Cloud Gate, and personally, I wouldn’t mind if the building above it made good on its promise and crushed the thing altogether.”

    Most Predictable: Jeff Koons, Balloon Rabbit (Red), at 51 Astor Place
    Jeff Koons, Balloon Rabbit (Red) (2005–10). Photo: Tom Powel Imaging. Courtesy the artist. © Jeff Koons.
    Balloon Rabbit (Red), 2005–10, which stands 14 feet tall and tips the scales at 6,600 pounds, has squatted (or whatever it is rabbits do) in the lobby of 51 Astor Place since 2014. 
    It comes from the collection of Edward J. Minskoff, whose equity company erected the 13-story, 430,000-square-foot building, where IBM is the anchor tenant in a neighborhood that has drastically gentrified over recent years. Just a few feet away, at Cooper Square, legendary conceptual artist David Hammons once performed his Bliz-aard Ball Sale (1983), in which the artist commented on the salability of whiteness and the absurdity of the art market by offering snowballs in various sizes to passersby on the sidewalk. 
    And speaking of the selling of whiteness and market madness, in 2019, Koons’s 3-foot-tall stainless-steel Rabbit (1986) fetched $91.1 million at Christie’s New York, setting a record for the priciest work ever sold at auction by a living artist.
    Having an artwork by a former Wall Street commodities broker from the collection of an equity guy dominating a lobby where giants like IBM are tenants is just so on the nose that to call it on the nose would be too on the nose. 
    Most Journalist-Friendly: Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, Moveable Type, at the New York Times Building
    Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, Moveable Type (2007). Courtesy: New York Times.
    When the New York Times moved into its $1 billion, Renzo Piano–designed Midtown Manhattan headquarters in 2007, the paper’s architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff wrote (where else?) in the Times that he was “enchanted” with the building. 
    Though Ouroussoff didn’t mention it in his review, one element that enchants most people’s  visiting the building is Moveable Type, a digital artwork by New York artist Ben Rubin and Columbia University journalism professor Mark Hansen. 
    The piece uses algorithms to parse selections of text from the paper’s daily output, as well as its archive and reader comments, which appear on some 560 small digital displays arrayed in two nearly 54-foot-wide grids. One algorithm, for example, pulls out noun phrases, another maps, another phrases containing numbers, yet another questions, as Rubin explains in a video (which, impressively, explains how many bad ideas they went through to arrive at this one).
    Most Literary: Jenny Holzer, 7 World Trade Center 
    Jenny Holzer, For 7 World Trade (2006). Photo: Joe Woolhead, courtesy Silverstein Properties.
    Rebuilt at a cost of some $700 million, 7 World Trade Center was the first office building to reopen at Ground Zero, five years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. So a public art commission for this emotionally fraught site must have been daunting. But Jenny Holzer (who indeed told the New York Times that she was “taken aback at the gravity of the project”) rose to the challenge with a work that captures decades of expressions about the city’s pleasures. 
    Stretching 65 feet wide and 14 feet high, Holzer’s For 7 World Trade was inaugurated in May 2006. The five-foot-high scrolling letters come from poems and prose texts about “the joy of being in New York City,” she told Art21, including works by writers like Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams, each writing about their first impressions of Gotham. In 2019, she added writing from 18 New York schoolchildren, and the text runs for a full 36 hours before repeating itself. 
    Besides the literary content, Holzer focused on a satisfying chromatic experience, saying, “I want color to suffuse the space and pulse and do all kinds of tricks.”
    Most Straight-Up Coolest: James Turrell, Plain Dress 2006, at 505 Fifth Avenue 
    James Turrell, Plain Dress (2006), at 505 Fifth Avenue. Photo: H.G. Esch, courtesy KPF.
    California Light and Space artist James Turrell is globally known for his Skyspaces and other installations that employ natural light and illumination to cast a spell. Construction is ongoing on his magnum opus, Roden Crater, in Northern Arizona.
    While we wait for that, we can see a small and subtle work, a collaboration with architects Kohn Pederson Fox, in the lobby of Midtown’s 505 Fifth Avenue. As recounted in Architect magazine, the client wanted to invite an artist to create a work in the lobby in collaboration with the architects. During the building’s development, KPF design principal Douglas Hocking made an offhand remark about the light in a rendering of the lobby reminding him of Turrell, and it was off to the races.
    Turrell transformed the lobby into a forced-perspective lightbox. Cabinets of light, vertical rectangles reminiscent of Mark Rothko paintings, anchor the installation. Behind their resin surfaces, a bank of LED lights is programmed to change color over a 24-hour cycle. The meditative interior provides a sublime contrast to the traffic and bustle of Fifth Avenue, just outside the glass entrance doors. 
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    10 Must-See Shows in Europe in 2024, From Naomi Campbell at the V&A to Anselm Kiefer in Florence

    Art lovers the world over will be swarming Europe next year for the Venice Biennale, which as per usual boasts dozens of national pavilions and the highly anticipated main exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere,” curated by Adriano Pedrosa. Anyone hoping to stay on for an early vacation is in luck, as the continent is anticipating a bumper crop of blockbuster museum shows, from a celebration of supermodel Naomi Campbell in London, to a retrospective honoring American land artist Nancy Holt in Berlin. There is also the opening of a shiny new museum dedicated to Nordic modernism in Kristiansand, a coastal city in southern Norway.
    Our European team has hand-picked what they are most excited to see in 2024.

    “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind”Tate Modern, LondonFebruary 15—September 1, 2024
    Yoko Ono, Half-A-Room, from Half – A Wind Show at Lisson Gallery London. Photo by Clay Perry ©Yoko Ono
    London played a tremendous role in the life and artistic career of Yoko Ono (born 1933, Tokyo). During her five-year stay, the U.K. capital was where the Japanese-born artist and activist encountered a web of artists and creative minds that had gathered there in the mid-1960s; it was also a place where she created some of her radical works, and the city where Ono met John Lennon, her future husband and long-time collaborator.
    In 2024, London will make a mark on Ono’s artistic trajectory again as Tate Modern stages “Music of the Mind,” the artist’s biggest exhibition in the U.K. to date. The show will feature more than 200 works ranging from installations, films, music, and photography that chart Ono’s path as a multidisciplinary artist and her profound impact on contemporary culture over the decades. Ono’s body of work created during her London years, including installations at Indica and Lisson Gallery such as Apple 1966 and Half-A-Room 1967, will be among the highlights.
    —Vivienne Chow 
    “Vera Molnár”Centre Pompidou, ParisFebruary 28—August 26, 2024
    Vera Molnár, Icône (1964). Photo: © Centre Pompidou / Dist. Rmn-Gp.
    This pioneer of computer art, who died in December at the age of 99, had a creative vision that was decades ahead of her time. When she began making generative artworks in the 1960s, using the early coding language of Fortran and computers that had mechanical plotters for printers, her peers could not understand it. In their eyes, she had “dehumanized” art, she said in an interview from her Paris nursing home in early 2022.
    Much has changed over the past ten years, as the world finally caught up with the significance of Molnar’s experiments with the creative relationship between systems and randomness. This retrospective ranges from drawings produced as early as 1946 to new work made in 2023.
    —Jo Lawson-Tancred

    “Roy Lichtenstein”The Albertina Museum, ViennaMarch 8—July 14, 2024
    Roy Lichtenstein, Wallpaper with Blue Floor Interior (1992). © Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photo Courtesy of Albertina, Vienna.

    In celebration of what would have been Roy Lichtenstein’s 100th birthday in 2024, Vienna’s Albertina Museum (with assistance from the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation and Estate) is putting on a major retrospective of the Pop Art legend’s work. The exhibition will include works on loan from private international collections and major institutions including New York’s Whitney Museum and MoMA, Vienna’s Museum Ludwig, and Madrid’s Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. The show follows the course of the artist’s five-decade career, starring his world-renowned large-scale comic-book inspired paintings from the 1960s. Other works on display include his 1970s mirror series, landscapes, and interiors.
    –Verity Babbs

    “Anselm Kiefer: Fallen Angels”Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi, FlorenceMarch 22—July 21, 2024
    German artist Anselm Kiefer “These Writings, When Burned, Will Finally Give Some Light” exhibition during the preview at Palazzo Ducale on March 25, 2022 in Venice, Italy. (Photo by Roberto Serra – Iguana Press/Getty Images)
    Anselm Kiefer returns to Italy after his major presentation at Palazzo Ducale in Venice 2022, this time taking over the historic Palazzo Strozzi for his major solo show “Fallen Angels.” Born in 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, Kiefer is known for his exploration of intricate emotions, memory, war, myth, and existence through his epic works, whether in the form of painting, or sculpture and installation. Curated by Arturo Galansino, director of the foundation, “Fallen Angels” will feature historical titles and new works, aiming to channel the “vital complexity” embodied in the art of the German artist.
    The show opening at the heel of 2023’s release of Anselm, the 3D documentary dedicated to the artist by the acclaimed Wim Wenders, who was also born in the same year as Kiefer and brought up in post-war Germany.
    —Vivienne Chow 

    “Nancy Holt: Circles of Light”Gropius Bau, BerlinMarch 22—July 21, 2024
    Archival image of Nancy Holt’s Holes of Light at the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition “Light Show” in 2013 (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)
    Born in 1938 in Worcester in Massachusetts and grew up in New Jersey, Nancy Holt was a member of the earth, land, and conceptual art movements. She was known for her site-specific installation and moving image through which she explored how we understand our place on earth for five decades. Featuring works including film, video, photography, poetry, sculptures, and installations drawn from over the past 25 years, “Circles of Light” at Gropius Bau is the most comprehensive survey exhibition of the artist in Germany to date. The show will also shine a spotlight on Holt’s working process through the presentation of texts and recordings by the artist.
    —Vivienne Chow 

    “Histórias indígenas / Urfolkshistorier”Kode Art Museum, BergenApril 26—August 25, 2024
    Duhigó, Nepu Arquepu (2019). Photo courtesy of Kode Bergen.

    Following its appearance in Brazil at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, ‘Histórias indígenas / Urfolkshistorier’ will arrive at Bergen’s Kode Art Museum for a four-month run. The exhibition explores Indigenous experiences across South America, North America, Oceania, and Scandinavia. Some 285 works by over 170 Indigenous and Indigenous-descent artists are brought together in the show, making sure to recognize the deeply complex and individual experiences of Indigenous people in each of the geographical areas explored in the exhibition. The show is also accompanied by two publications, a catalogue, and an anthology, which further explore the research put into the exhibition.
    —Verity Babbs

    “Passions of the North”Kunstsilo, NorwayOpening May 11, 2024
    Franciska Clausen, Contrastes des formes (1927). Photo: © Øystein Thorvaldsen.
    Nordic modernism will be put on Europe’s cultural map next spring with the opening of the Kunstsilo in Kristiansand, southern Norway. The unique 1930s silo building has been converted into a state-of-the-art museum to house the expansive collection of Norwegian collector Nicolai Tangen. Its inaugural exhibition offers a greatest hits tour of this new holding, with a mix of avant-garde artists representing not only Norway but Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland.
    —Jo Lawson-Tancred

    “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting”Kunstmuseum BaselMay 25—October 27, 2024
    Zandile Tshabalala, Two Reclining Women (2020). Photo courtesy of the Maduna Collection, © Zandile Tshabalala Studio.
    Traveling to Europe after a critically acclaimed debut at the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town, South Africa, this survey show brings together over 200 artworks by African artists like Ben Enwonwu and Zandile Tshabalala alongside those from the Diaspora, including Michael Armitage, Amy Sherald, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. It may well be the most comprehensive study of the Black figure in painting to date.
    With a title that inverts When They See Us, a Netflix drama from 2019 about the prejudiced incrimination of the Central Park Five, the show celebrates artworks that defy racist assumptions, organizing its exhibits under themes like “Joy & Revelry” and “Sensuality.”
    —Jo Lawson-Tancred

    “NAOMI”Victoria & Albert Museum, LondonJune 22, 2024–April 6, 2025
    Naomi Campbell (2023). Photo by Marco Bahler for V&A.

    Taking to the runway for the first time at 15 after having been scouted in London’s Covent Garden, Naomi Campbell was just 18 when she became the first Black model on the cover of Vogue Paris, and has since starred on the front cover of more than 500 magazines.
    From June, the V&A in London is celebrating the supermodel with an exhibition exploring her 40 year career in fashion. Around 100 outfits from Campbell’s personal wardrobe, including loaned pieces from her illustrious catwalk career and photographs by Tim Walker and Steven Meisel will be on display in this first-of-its-kind exhibition tracking Campbell’s work as a model, activist, and actress. This is a dream exhibition for fans of cultural history.
    —Verity Babbs

    “Art Povera”Bourse de Commerce, ParisOctober 9, 2024–March 24, 2025

    Giuseppe Penone, Essere Vento (2014). Photo courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, Giuseppe PENONE © Adagp, Paris, 2023

    Curated by Arte Povera expert Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the upcoming exhibition at Bourse de Commerce looks back at the history of the Italian “Poor Art” movement. The radical Arte Povera group exhibited together from the mid-1960s through into the ’70s, focused on the boundaries and mutualities between nature and culture, daily life and tradition, and using non-traditional everyday materials. The informal group was made up of artists across Italy, including key figures Alighiero Boetti, Jannis Kounellis, and Mario Merz. This show examines how the movement influenced the course of art history, using works from the Pinault Collection and pieces on loan from major European collections both private and public, including works owned by original Arte Povera artists.
    —Verity Babbs

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    Musician Nick Cave Will Debut His New, Devilish Ceramics at a Brussels Show in 2024

    Musician and artist Nick Cave will have his debut commercial exhibition at Xavier Hufkens gallery in Brussels in 2024. Cave has called the work going on display as “a journey towards some kind of absolution from a series of shattering events.”
    Cave was born in Australia in 1957 and has achieved worldwide recognition as a singer, songwriter, author, and composer. He studied painting at Melbourne’s Caulfield Institute of Technology before turning his attention to a musical career that has seen him lead bands including The Birthday Party and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds since the late ’70s. In recent years, Cave has released a memoir Faith, Hope and Carnage, and has been exploring ceramics as a medium.
    The show will open in April 2024 and presents Cave’s first major body of visual work, entitled “The Devil—A Life (2020–22).” The collection is made up of 17 glazed ceramic figurines following the cradle-to-grave story of the Devil. Stylistically, the sculptures are reminiscent of Victorian Staffordshire “flatback” figurines which were made from the mid-18th century and were popular for display on mantlepieces.
    Nick Cave. Photo by Megan Cullen, courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.
    Cave’s ceramic works were first shown in Finland in September 2022 at the Sara Hildén Art Museum as part of the group exhibition “We,” which also included works by actor Brad Pitt and artist Thomas Houseago.
    In this new series, Cave frames the character of the Devil as a complex, flawed, everyday character. Told through the series of ceramic figurines, we watch as the Devil is born, inherits the world, falls in love, fights a lion, rides off to war, and is shunned for causing the death of his child, before he himself dies. This arc is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s “Seven Ages of Man” from the 1623 comedy As You Like It: infant, schoolchild, lover, soldier, judge, dotage and decrepitude. As major changes occur in the Devil’s life, his appearance is altered, particularly the shape of his horns.
    Nick Cave, Devil As Child (2020–22). Courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.
    Cave has long held an intense, if conflicted, interest in Christianity: “I believe in God in spite of religion, not because of it,” he said in 2010. Over the years, themes related to faith and the Devil have popped up in his songs (“Up Jumped the Devil,” “Jesus Alone“), just as they were woven into his first novel, 1989’s And the Ass Saw the Angel.
    In a statement, he characterized the ceramic series headed to Brussels next year, along with his songs, as centered on “the idea of forgiveness, the idea that there is a moral virtue in beauty. It’s a kind of balancing of our sins.”
    “The Devil—A Life (2020–22)” is on view at Xavier Hufkens, 6-8, Sint-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussel, Belgium, April 5 through May 11, 2024.

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    Tracey Emin’s New Paintings Explore the Depths of Vulnerability. See Them Here

    A deep red the hue of blood appears in many of the loose, figurative paintings that make up “Lovers Grave,” a new exhibition by Tracey Emin at White Cube New York. In some instances, the red evokes violence; others, love. More often than not, it’s both at once—an intense concentration of emotion communicated through saturation of color and force of application.  
    That love and violence would be two poles guiding Emin’s new body of work makes sense: the artist, long known for her confrontational installations, sculptures, films, and other works, is just three years removed from being diagnosed with cancer. She beat it, thankfully, but not without major sacrifice—including an emergency surgery to remove numerous female reproductive organs from her body. 
    Tracey Emin, Yes I miss You (2023). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
    Projecting an artist’s trauma onto their work is not something to be done lightly, but in this case, it’s apt. Emin’s life has always intermixed with her art; her vulnerability is what made her a young art star in ’90s London and it’s what has made her work endure since. Just as she’s been open about other deeply personal experiences throughout her career, the artist has been candid about her surgery and its effects. She’s also been candid about the relationship that kept her tethered throughout. 
    The name of “Lovers Grave” comes from the images that helped inspire it: that is, photographs from archaeological burial sites, where human remains were excavated in entwined pairs—skeletons in a perpetual state of embrace. You’ll find variations of that motif throughout the exhibition, though whether Emin’s figures are united in gestures of romantic comfort or carnal passion isn’t clear.  
    Tracey Emin, There was blood (2022). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
    This sense of equivocality may leave some thinking these are angry paintings, but it’s more likely that the opposite is true. These are some of the warmest artworks that Emin has ever made.  
    “I had fucking cancer, and having half my body chopped out, including half my vagina,” the artist told Artnet News in 2020. “I can feel more than ever that love is allowed.”  
    “At my age now, love is a completely different dimension and level of understanding,” she continued. “I don’t want children, I don’t want all the things that you might subconsciously crave when you’re young—I just want love. And as much love as I can possibly have. I want to be smothered in it, I want to be devoured by it. And I think that is okay.” 
    See more paintings from “Lovers Grave” below.
    Tracey Emin, The Beginning and The end of Everything (2023). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
    Tracey Emin, We died Again (2023). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
    Tracey Emin, Is Nothing Sacred (2023). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
    Tracey Emin, There was no Right way (2022). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
    Tracey Emin, And It was Love (2023). © Tracey Emin. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
    “Tracey Emin: Lovers Grave” is on view now through January 13, 2024 at White Cube New York. 

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    Long-Overlooked Abstract Painter Emily Mason Finally Gets Her Due at a New York Show

    A growing number of women abstract painters have had a revival in recent years, after decades of languishing in the shadows of their more famous male peers. The latest to join the crop is Emily Mason, whose turn towards abstract painting saw her follow in the footsteps of her mother Alice Trumball Mason, a co-founder the American Abstract Artists organization in New York in 1936.
    Mason’s pioneering mother also introduced a her to a wider artistic circle, which included family friends like Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Helen Frankenthaler. From this unusually creative upbringing, Mason went on to complete her studies at Cooper Union in 1955, and she recalls feeling encouraged to reject the course’s more rigid, traditional teachings on the advice of Elaine de Kooning and Joan Mitchell.
    Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn in their shared Venice Italy studio in 1957. Photo: Tinto Brass.
    Soon after graduation, Mason moved to Venice, Italy on a Fulbright grant. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that she permanently resettled in the U.S. with her German husband Wolf Kahn. The couple and their two daughters lived in a small apartment in Greenwich Village, which forced Mason to use her bedroom as a makeshift studio. Due to Kahn’s commercial success, Mason took on more of the domestic labor and spent shorter days in the studio. “The ’70s were difficult times as bringing up children, running a household, and continuing to paint all pulled me in different directions,” she later recalled.
    Despite these frustrations, Mason greatly enjoyed her life at center of the global art scene. “That’s one thing about living in New York. You get to see a lot of what other people are doing, where their heads are at, and being able to talk with each other,” she said in 1975. “You feed off it, one way or another.” Nonetheless, she also struggled to get gallery representation in a very male-dominated world. One place of respite was the family’s farm in Vermont, where she would spent long, productive summers in the studio.
    Emily Mason in her Vermont studio in 2018. Photo: Joshua Farr.
    Mason gained recognition for her harmonious, fluid compositions made form layers of vibrantly colored pigment, an effect achieved by pouring paint onto the canvas as it lay flat on the floor. These unpredictable experiments in alchemy were sometimes adjusted afterwards, by hand or using a scraper or paintbrush to play with the pooling pigments.
    “I like to feel that I work on a painting until something magical happens,” she said in 1975. “Until it becomes something outside of myself, a new vision… You lose a kind of control, but you gain something else.” Mason continued creating paintings using similar techniques until her death in 2019.
    This earlier period of Mason’s long career is the subject of a new exhibition “The Thunder Hurried Slow: Emily Mason Paintings, 1968–1979” at Miles McEnery Gallery in New York. Check out more works from the show below.
    Emily Mason, Velvet Masonry (1978). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
    Emily, The Thunder Hurried Slow (1978). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
    Emily Mason, Lignite (1968). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
    Emily Mason, Pleasure Garden (1970). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
    Emily Mason, A Paper of Pins (1974). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.
    Emily Mason, Defiant of a Road (1972). Photo courtesy of Miles McEnery Gallery.

    “The Thunder Hurried Slow: Emily Mason Paintings, 1968–1979” is on view at Miles McEnery Gallery, 525 W 22nd St, New York, through February 3, 2024.

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    Zoya Cherkassky’s ‘October 7 2023’ Series Premieres at New York’s Jewish Museum

    Ten days after the October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas, when the photographs of murder, torture, and kidnappings appeared all over the news and social media, artist Zoya Cherkassky posted her first artwork about the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
    Cherkassky, who immigrated to Israel in 1991 from the former Soviet Union, followed the grim toll in disbelief: 1,200 people murdered and 240 taken hostage.
    “This was the only thing I could think about,” she said in an interview from her home in Ramat Gan, a suburb of Tel Aviv. “Normally my work is based on what I see, what’s around me. It was obvious that this would be the subject of my work.”
    Now, the 12 mixed-media works on paper comprising Cherkassky’s “7 October 2023” series are installed at the Jewish Museum in New York as part of its expanded programming to address the war in the Middle East and its reverberations around the world.
    One of the first initiatives by the Jewish Museum’s new director James Snyder, it will include installations and public talks, examining how artists respond to conflict and war through contemporary and historic lens. The show has arrived quickly for a major museum, opening on December 15, two months since Hamas’s attack.
    Zoya Cherkassky, Bring Them Back Home (2023). Courtesy: Fort Gansevoort.
    The project was key for Snyder, who took the reins of the Jewish Museum’s on November 1, encountering an art world (and world) divided over the war in the Middle East. “We felt it was important to demonstrate this kind of action through a cultural lens and to do it quickly,” Snyder said. He described Cherkassky’s series as “art activism.”
    From the moment Snyder arrived, he set out plans to use the museum’s mandate—of exploring Jewish identity throughout history and across the global diaspora —to “realize a path to a brighter future and to find restorative pathways to the humanism that is the essence of our being,” he said in his first letter to the museum community.
    “This shows how art responds to and resonates with things that happen. And we can see this in history. You can think of artists throughout time who’ve done it,” said Snyder. “You can see how Dadaism grew out of the chaos of World War I or abstraction grew out of the chaos of World War II.”
    The Israel Museum, where Snyder served as director for 22 years, gave Cherkassky a solo exhibition in 2018. He was a fan and kept abreast of her work, visiting her solo show at the Fort Gansevoort gallery in New York earlier this year. So did Darsie Alexander, the museum’s chief curator.
    Cherkassky created the series in Berlin, where she fled on October 9 with her 8-year-old daughter, leaving her mother and Nigerian-born husband behind in Israel. Modest in size (10-by-13 inches), the drawings were easy to transport and only needed to be framed for the installation.
    Zoya Cherkassky, The Survivor, (2023). Courtesy: Fort Gansevoort.
    “There were so many sirens and then you could hear the explosions,” the artist said. “My daughter was shaking all over. I didn’t know if there would be serious bombardment and decided to leave with her.”
    Flames, blood, ashes, tears, screaming mouths, and tied hands appear in Cherkassky’s 12 haunting works, where frantic and forlorn figures are set against black backgrounds. She turned to the visual language of artists who depicted tragedy and war in the first half of the 20th century: Pablo Picasso, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Max Beckman. She used pencils, watercolor, and wax crayons. “Somehow through these artists I was able to talk about this tragedy,” she said.
    The early images of the atrocities at Kibbutz Be’eri made Cherkassky think of Guernica, one of Picasso’s most famous paintings, created following German bombing of the Basque town in 1937.
    People look at Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) at the Reina Sofia Museum. Photo by Denis Doyle/Getty Images.
    Kidnapped Women shows a multi-generational group of weeping and scared women walking barefoot, their colorful dresses set against black background. The elderly woman in the center of the group has “A24102” tattooed on her arm, alluding to her concentration camp past.
    The Terrorist Attack at Nova Music Festival depicts young women running through a field, dotted with blood, their hair blowing in the wind, eyes huge with fear—an antithesis to the static Surrealist maidens of Paul Delaux. That so many characters in her drawings are women is not accidental; Cherkassky specifically wanted to call attention to sexual violence against women, including young women, by Hamas. “As a woman and a mother of a girl,” she said. “This is the scariest thing I could imagine.”
    Zoya Cherkassky, Kidnapped Women, (2023). Courtesy: Fort Gansevoort
    Only one work, Kidnapped Children, depicts real people, Cherkassky said. At the time she made the work, 18 kids were thought to be kidnapped and she drew their faces to raise awareness for the “Bring Them Back Home” campaign, she said.
    The museum wall text notes: “Later counts reveal that almost 40 children were abducted. Since Cherkassky created this work in October, many of these children have been released, but as of early December, over one hundred adults and children are still in captivity.”
    “No drawing can compete with photography in terms of being graphic,” she said. “I am very grateful to the Jewish Museum for not being afraid to show this work at the time when a lot of organizations, even Jewish ones, are scared to present the Israeli perspective.”

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    See Inside the Newly Revived Luna Luna, the Long-Forgotten Fair With Artist-Designed Rides

    It’s a tale that’s almost mythical. In 1987, an amusement park populated by rides and attractions created by the era’s leading artists landed in Hamburg, Germany, the brainchild of Austrian artist André Heller. There was an entrance archway designed by Sonia Delaunay, a carousel painted by Keith Haring, and to top it all off, a Ferris wheel dreamed up by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Dubbed Luna Luna, the fair only had a limited engagement in Germany, before its 30 pavilions were packed up and stashed in storage—left forgotten for nearly four decades. 
    Enter Drake. Last year, the rapper’s entertainment company, DreamCrew, along with partners Something Special Studios and Charles Dorrance-King, announced plans to resurrect the amusement park, investing a reported $100 million. And lo, it has come to pass: “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” has opened in a 60,000-square-feet warehouse in Los Angeles, offering a recreation of the fantastical fairground with the original rides. 
    Jean Michel-Basquiat’s painted Ferris wheel at Luna Luna in Hamburg, Germany, 1987. Photo: Sabina Sarnitz.
    Patrons lining up outside Roy Lichtenstein’s Luna Luna Pavilion at Luna Luna in Hamburg, Germany, 1987. Photo: Sabina Sarnitz.
    “What makes Luna Luna so special is these marquee names that were locked away in this art-historical secret,” Lumi Tan, the project’s curatorial director, told CBS News. “André Heller saw it as breaking down the boundaries between artists of different generations and disciplines. You have Keith Haring, young Pop artist, but then you also have Roy Lichtenstein, one of the founders of Pop art.” 
    The venue is divided into two spaces, conjoined by Delauney’s geometrically painted arch, adorned by the original Luna Luna sign. The first area opens up with David Hockney’s cylindrical forest pavilion, Kenny Scharf’s polychromatic chair swing ride, and Heller’s inflatable structure, Dream Station. In the second space is a view of Basquiat’s Ferris wheel, as well as works by Joseph Beuys, Jim Whiting, and Monika GilSing. 
    Installation view of “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” featuring Keith Haring’s painted carousel and murals. Photo: Jeff McLane.
    A number of these pavilions are accompanied by music. Salvador Dalí’s mirrored fun house, for example, is backed by a soundscape of Gregorian chants by Blue Chip Orchestra, while Roy Lichtenstein’s glass labyrinth is soundtracked by Philip Glass’s minimalist notes. Performers wandering the floor will also interact with visitors, adding to the carnival-esque vibe. 
    Alas, due to the delicate condition of these works, not all of them can be ridden, though they remain operational. Visitors, however, are invited to walk through and around the attractions. 
    Luna Luna art technicians assemble Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painted Ferris wheel at the Luna Luna warehouse, Los Angeles. © Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat/licensed by Artestar , New York. Photo courtesy Luna Luna, LLC.
    This new iteration of Luna Luna was more than a year in the making. After the works were transported from a storage facility in rural Texas to Los Angeles, a conservation team led by Rosa Lowinger and Joel Searles commenced unboxing and restoring the attractions. “It was very fun,” Searles said about cracking open the containers for the first time in decades. “We knew it was a Haring and you’re unwrapping it like a present.”
    The revived fair will also include an exhibition of archival photos, videos, and other ephemera that trace Luna Luna’s journey from its original run to its recent assembly. 
    In-progress assembly of Kenny Scharf’s painted chair swing ride at the Luna Luna warehouse, Los Angeles. Photo courtesy Luna Luna, LLC.
    Back in the 1980s, Heller conceived of the original Luna Luna as a way to bring “art… to those who might not ordinarily seek it out in more predictable settings,” he said in a statement (Heller is not involved with the new project). It’s a prescient vision now fulfilled and expanded on by the abundance of Instagram-friendly, immersive art offerings—which the new Luna Luna now joins. 
    And it’s only just getting started, according to Anthony Gonzales of the DreamCrew. “‘Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy’ is the first instalment,” he said in a statement, “of what will be a long-term project with a multifaceted approach exploring the world of art and its intersection with today’s modern world.” 
    See more images from the exhibition below.
    A performer in front of Sonia Delauney’s entrance archway at “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy.” Photo: Sinna Nasseri.
    Installation view of “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” featuring Kenny Scharf’s painted chair swing ride. Photo: Joshua White.
    Installation view of “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” featuring Keith Haring’s painted carousel and David Hockney’s Enchanted Tree. Photo: Jeff McLane.
    Installation view of “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” featuring Salvador Dalí’s Dalidom. Photo: Joshua White.
    Installation view of “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy,” featuring Kenny Scharf’s painted swing chair ride and surrounding sculptures. Photo: Joshua White.
    A couple being “wed” at André Heller’s Wedding Chapel at “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy.” Photo: Sinna Nasseri.
    Performers alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painted Ferris wheel at “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy.” Photo: Sarah Mathison.
    “Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy” is on view at 1601 E 6th Street, Los Angeles, California, through Spring 2024.

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